Setting up the Movement Building working group

Movement Building
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This is a space for building the new strategic working group, Movement Building. For more clarity on the role that strategic groups will play, see here.

Movement Building draft Purpose

  • Building a grass roots base of worker cooperative organisers and supporters
  • Developing, compiling and disseminating educational and promotional resources to make the system of worker control and worker ownership more relevant and accessible to new workers
  • Participating in national and international cooperative networks and campaigns
  • Making alliances with other social and environmental movements

Movement Building draft Domains

To be explored

Movement Building example Projects

  • Co-op Fortnight
  • Autumn Assembly event
  • Speaking to worker co-ops (phone banking, visits)
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2nd Movement Building working group meeting, 6th June 12-1pm

We have had the first Movement Building meeting, now it’s time to head face on strategy, planning and projects. What should the Movement Building group be priortising as it is formed? How can we ramp up supporters and worker co-ops’ engagement? And how should we build alliances with the breadth of voices in the room?

We already have potential project groups (sub-groups of the Movement Building group) for: Co-op Fortnight, Worker Co-op Weekend 2025, Autumn Assembly, Communications working group, Co-ops and Anti-Racism and International working group.

Reminder- Background
The Movement Building working group has been set up with a strategic remit to oversee the following domains:

  • Building a grass roots base of worker cooperative organisers and supporters
  • Developing, compiling and disseminating educational and promotional resources to make the system of worker control and worker ownership more relevant and accessible to new workers
  • Participating in national and international cooperative networks and campaigns
  • Making alliances with other social and environmental movements

This forum space is for conversation about forming the group, contributing agenda items or ideas for discussions, project groups, etc.

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Has a date for the next Movement Building working group been mused?

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Hey Matt, no it hasn’t. It’s sort of on hold at the moment as there has been a struggle with getting numbers for the group to work (last time it was postponed due to low attendence). It’s taken up quite a lot of time/energy to attempt get the group going and that’s been a struggle now with John leaving. Maybe something for the old Mobilising members to put their heads to or support with, if we could find a time to meet as the old group to plan support with the new group. What do you think?

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Sam would you mind giving us a little update of what you have tried so far? I would like to comment, but don’t want to suggest anything that you have already done.

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Hiya
I’d say it’s more of an issue of the paid workers not having the capacity to drive the groups into fruition right now from scratch which wasn’t what we necessarily were thinking would be needed. I think it was bad luck that it so happened most members of Mobilising didn’t join the SG it turned into & when everyone was feeding into and co-designing the changes this wasn’t something we all budgeted for. So from the outset we have to start from scratch in terms of finding new committed members of the SGs and rebuilding that lost knowledge and commitment, which feels like an uphill battle given the existing challenge of engaging our membership.
Most of the attendees of the first successful meeting were external non-members and not people who were in worker co-ops necessarily (So more like alliances & partnership folk which also important separately).
Overall I think the hope was more of a member-driven change over to the new SGs and that’s the main barrier.
In terms of what we’ve done we’ve held one large meeting, followed that up with the next meeting date, which was postponed due to low numbers, the next and final meeting we’ve had was cancelled due to non-attendence. We’ve advertised in the events listing, newsletter and specific SG mailers. We have the sign up on the website also. We’ve personally contacted members of member co-ops & individuals we thought may be intersted in the SG aims and goals. We’ve also thought how to facilitate the session, the first one was more of an ‘open meeting’ but we think future ones could be topic based.
In the meantime phone banking is on hold as capacity for phone banking wasn’t there but it might be really useful if Mobilising could regroup as a one-off to problem solve, perhaps in September or perhaps through attending a Movement Building meeting that is organised and playing a facilitatory role in that meeting in providing some momentum
Hope useful!

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As a non Movement Building Group observer, I’d suggest it might be worth finding out why people who were previously involved in other groups (e.g. Mobilising) are not interested in the Movement Building Strategic Group. Maybe the old Mobilising group could be convinced to do this as a handover activity? Sounds like a potential major design problem which might need addressing to avoid stagnation and ultimately system failure.

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For sure, the feedback I got through our Mobilising check-out was a couple of members were planning on stepping back anyway after putting a lot of work into getting the fed up and running, and it felt like the natural point for that step back to happen. Another member wanted to switch to the Co-op Support and Dev SG. One member has joined Movement Building but is over capacity a lot of the time, and finally I think there was some uncertainty overall about what the SG would be/purpose etc.

You’re right, if the old Mobilising group could temporarily come back to play a handover role or thinking about how to handover that would be a good solution

Do you have any insights @NathanBrown from Co-op Support & Development strategic group? As I think the experience there is quite different with membership of old Member Learning still constant?

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Very little to report as we are awaiting a meeting date. Our initial meeting had a few of us present from the previous Member Learning Group but if I recall correctly people weren’t too bothered about the strategic stuff and more interested in the implementation/operational (“projects”) but we agreed to stick with it. We were also trying to understand how the group relates to the Board and other groups. I think people often struggle with the lack of structure e.g if the answer to the question “What is this group here to do?” is “What do you want it to do?”. Using a ship analogy, not everyone wants to design and build a new ship. Some people want to have a say in destination, some want to have a go at steering, some are happy to work on the engine. I think once the SGs start doing stuff their role - and the commitment entailed - will become clearer, and people may sign up. Sorry I can’t shed more light.

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That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the thoughts Nathan.
I like the ship analogy.

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